accompanying

Pluralaccompanyings

1. 1
   adjective

   Present or occurring alongside something else.

   Like background music that plays while the main event goes on.

   The report arrived with an accompanying chart showing the data.

   Each ticket includes an accompanying guide to the exhibits.

   Similarattached, enclosed, supplementary, complementary

   Note

   The verb's participle the participle of accompany settled into an adjective, and it sits naturally before its noun: the accompanying letter, chart or pages. Coleridge's Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life (1848) opens on "the accompanying pages," a typical document-and-enclosure use. When the description follows the noun, English usually returns to the verb: the chart accompanying the report, the chart that accompanies it.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of accompany.

   The pianist is accompanying the choir during the concert.

   Accompanying her grandmother to appointments became a weekly routine.

   Note

   Here the verb's full range is in play, and the object decides the meaning. With a person as object it means going along (accompanying her grandmother); with a singer, choir or instrument it means playing the supporting part. Musicians also use it with no object at all: she is accompanying tonight. Two older intransitive uses, keeping company and cohabiting, are obsolete, so they belong only in historical writing.

3. 3
   noun

   Something that comes along with something else or goes with it, in the way an accompaniment does.

   Note

   A rare noun that does the work accompaniment normally does, and it takes a plural. William Thompson Bacon's Poems (1839) gives a holiday "its accompanyings — loud laughs, and jests, / And boisterous mirth," a list of things that come along with the occasion. In ordinary prose, accompaniment is the safer choice; accompanyings has a deliberately literary, poetic texture.

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